Gaming Daily A-Z

screenshot of Black Dog: A fallen angel flying through hell's caves, burdened by mystical weights, with progress being limited by only slowly regenerating feathers, the many-tongued flying black beast directly behind the angel (interpretation of reviewer) Black Dog is a dark-theme reaction/precision type side-scroller that will run in your modern HTML5/Javascript-supporting browser. It has beautiful minimal original pixel artwork and at the same time uses works from OpenGameArt . I highly recommend following Wilbefast if you're interested in Android game development and game dev jams. Most content is related to open source and will soon be added to our  FreeGameDev PlanetDev  feed aggregator.

image labeled "Text-Based Game": ASCII-Art Female with a o_o expression. Buttons saying "Attack" and "Glare" next to her, the first being selected Moosader - creator, host and leading contributor to OpenArt - also hosts game development competitions on her community's forum. The current theme is "Text-Based Game" and will be over in 9 days, so feel free to join! There are 25 projects in it so far. Make a text-based game, like Zork, Adventure, Nethack, or something completely your own! I spotted some free, open source projects among them [ 1 ] [ 2 ] but didn't have time to take a closer look. There's parody, Lua, C++ and JavaScript represented is all I can tell so far.

Normally qubodup is responsible for this type of games (I have to admit, never liked Morrowind, nor any predecessors or sequels), but since they are doing such a good job of promoting it (and Q is busy), so I will give them their desired news: The OpenMW developers have just released our latest version of OpenMW. I was hoping you could post on Freegamer. Below is our message, feel free to put your own spin on it. Also it looks like the Arx Liberatis folks are almost ready to release their 1.0. Thanks! OpenMW 0.13.0 trailer Hot on the heels of 0.12.0, the OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.13.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA . Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page . This release notably includes functional NPC dialogue, and beautiful sky! There is a great new demonstration video for 0.13.0 up YouTube channel and a new video showing off our improved physics implementation which is schedul...

Open Source Conference Next weekend you will have the chance to hear a talk by the Linux game development legend Ryan " Icculus " Gordon on open-source tools for game development : Increasingly, the best tools for building games for any platform don't cost a dime. This talk will offer an overview of several of the best open source technologies available to game developers today. Topics will include audio, graphics, filesystems, and scripting. While this won't be a tutorial session, it will be fairly technical in nature, and will be useful for those looking to hack out their first game, or build the next Call of Duty sequel. I hope they will record this for those who can not attend it personally. We will keep you updated on this next week I guess.

First, a note on relevance: This issue is related to FOSS gaming in that it affects the FOSS community as a whole, and the FOSS gaming community with it.  The fact that it's an overall FOSS issue doesn't render it irrelevant to gaming. ...and a warning: This is a rant.  I believe it's clear from the blog entry that the feelings I'm expressing here are directed at a small subset of the community and not everyone who happens to read the blog.  So, as you read this, consider if what I'm saying applies to you.  If it doesn't, then I'm not ranting at you.  If it does, well, I'm Bart Kelsey, I run OpenGameArt.org, and I stand by what I said. Anyone who reads my blog entries knows that I love stirring up controversy.  As such, it's probably not a big surprise that I'm taking on this topic, since it tends to draw so much vitriol from some parts of the FOSS community. Here's the thing, though.  Being against sexism shouldn't be controversial .  R...

 Freesound survey banner What do you use Freesound for? Do you perceive some shared goals in Freesound user community? If so, which ones? What kinds of sounds are you most interested in? What makes Freesound different from other sound sharing sites? This open survey consists of the four questions above. Please fill it out. This is an opportunity to represent the free and open source game creation community's sound (licensing) needs at the largest and most comfortable freely-licensed sound library. FYI: Freesound supports the Creative Commons Zero and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licenses.

Matt Raykowski , aka sfb, is a community herder for the Ryzom Core project and Summer of Code mentor. Some people may not be familiar with Google's Summer of Code. Annually Google hosts two programs: Summer of Code and Code In. Google Code In (aka GCI) is a contest for 13-18 year olds to engage them in open source that features a variety of tasks and projects for them to complete for points. Google Summer of Code (aka SoC or GSoC) is a program to encourage college students to participate in open source development. It is a 3 month long project that pays USD$2500 per evaluation period - there is a mid-term and final evaluation. You can find a detailed timeline on their site and a complete list of organizations . The student application period begins on March 26th, 2012 and ends on April 6th, 2012. The actual programming portion of the project is between May 21st, 2012 and August 20th, 2012. In years past Google hasn't given a lot of love to open source games in its Summer of ...

Almost forgot posting about this... somehow our "own" projects here on FreeGameDev.net get somewhat neglected on the blog from time to time... But it's not because we don't care ;) So check this great new trailer for Me and My Shadow : New Me and My Shadow trailer Or head over to the release announcement on our forums to read about the changes in version 0.3 and download it! Don't forget to comment too ;)

Hot news of today is the Alpha 9 release of 0 A.D.: 0 A.D. Alpha 9 gameplay Main additions are the Roman faction, a new combat concept and new trading system. The new combat concept allows for a strategic selection of your troops to counter certain units (spearmen are better against cavalry and so on) and the trading systems allows for setting up trade routes etc. Oh and they are still looking for contributers ;) A little bit less hot news, but still quite recent, is the new version 1.0.3.3. of Zero-K , a cool RTS set in the future (if you are a regular reader you should know it ;) ). Zero-K gameplay It now runs on the recently released 87.0 release of the SpringEngine and also features a new faction: the amphibious bots. Sadly their interesting meta-game PlanetWars is currently closed for reworking, but the next round will happen at some point for sure.

Trophy's shop The top-down racing/shooting game  Trophy 2.0 brings championship, shop, key configuration, load/save features and lot of code refactoring. It requires ClanLib 1.0, which unfortunately fails to compile on Arch Linux. If you too can't get this game to run, there's still Bandit Racer  for playing in the browser.

For those not playing with the autobuild releases, I have good news! A new version of the totally FOSS, competitive multiplayer FPS Xonotic has been released. Find the released announcement and download links directly here. The two most important feature additions are a stats tracking system, which can be found via this webpage . And the addition of client side scripted player-models, which probably doesn't say much to the regular user, but from a developer's point of view it is a pretty great thing ;) Expect many cool advances to come from this over the next couple of months. Oh and try also the Overkill server, which runs a cool mod with totally new player-models and weapon mechanics, combining insta-gib with a more complex game-play etc. (in Xonotic, server admins can decide to hosts mods and players are automatically supplied with all needed files when joining the server). Let's hope this new release will increase the player-base a bit, as this game really deserves mor...

image: Sky in OpenMW (scheduled for 0.13) OpenMW 0.12 has been released: This release notably includes NPC and Creature animation, though no A.I. has been implemented, so animations must be activated through console commands. Please review the following: Regressions: Sounds other than music not working Scroll and button background graphics in launcher not working in Linux package Important notes: You must remove all old openmw.cfg files in order for the automatic detection of Morrowind installations to work. If the data path is set manually and it contains spaces, it needs to be put inside quotation marks. Changelog: Various rendering fixes and optimizations Refactored engine class Automatic package building Various build fixes and cleanup Various configuration fixes and cleanup, including detection of existing Morrowind installations Basic NPC/Creature animation support added, must be activated from console Basic implementation of Journal Window added Fix for local scripts continuing...

image: Unknown Horizon's multiplayer menu There have been six updates on Unknown Horizon's blog this year alone and their latest is an invitation to a multiplayer gaming session . Saturday, March 10, 16:00 GMT ( convert to your time zone ) You will have to get and compile the development builds for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows but the guidelines are extensive and you can get real-time support via IRC, so don't let that intimidate you. :) images: showing off Unknown Horizon's multiplayer chat

Arx Libertatis logo Arx Libertatis is the name of the GPLv3-ed Arx Fatalis (proprietary game) engine. It features a unique "draw symbols to cast spells" magic system and has an own scripting engine (described as "a mess, but at least a human readable mess"). video: Arx Libertatis status Feb 2012 The game engine runs the proprietary game with tolerable lag in some game areas on an ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook on Linux and I am close to completing the game from start to end. It can also be compiled on Windows and OS X. A stable release is not yet finished. Can Arx Libertatis be used to create a free-as-in-freedom game? No. Not yet. As-is, i don't think creating custom models, etc. will be easy. We will add support for more common formats in the future, but for now our focus has been on porting and cleaning up the engine and there is still lots to clean up. dscharrer of #arxfatalis While image and sound files are in common formats, 3d models are in a format that mostl...

Hmm... the previously mentioned TremZ project, which btw changed name to "Unvanquished" (which I find much less catchy than the previous name) has released as promised their first alpha on the last day of February. However as I can't get it to run on Linux (nor on Windows for that matter), I will have to rely on forum postings from which I extract that it really is an alpha and you shouldn't get your hopes too high that it is much more than Tremulous at this point (graphics and game-play wise)... WIP Unvanquished playermodel But try it yourself... if you are on a non-optimus system it will probably work fine with Windows ;) Edit:  A somewhat controversial split-up seems to have happened in the development team. Read here about one side of the argument... you can find the over side of the discussion also via the forums or the irc channels. Not sure what to make of it, but I will keep you informed as soon as the dust has settled ;)